


Real Ghosts

by MyOwnSuperintendent



Series: A Different Place [3]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-13 21:47:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16480355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyOwnSuperintendent/pseuds/MyOwnSuperintendent
Summary: Samantha doesn't care for Halloween, but she finds that it has its attractions.  Set in 2000.





	Real Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> This is set after "A Different Place."
> 
> I don't own The X-Files or anything related to it. Hope you enjoy!

This will be Samantha’s fourth time having Halloween, and she still doesn’t really understand it.  A lot of holidays have strange things about them, but Halloween is the strangest, she thinks.  First of all, people you don’t even know give you candy.  She’d understand if you got it from people you knew—then it would be like a present that you give someone you care about—but the way it works on Halloween doesn’t make a lot of sense.  It would be easier to just get candy at the store.  It would be easier for her, especially, because their house is out in the country and they don’t have a lot of neighbors, so they always drive over to Dana’s and go trick-or-treating there.  Yes, it would be a lot easier to go to the store.

Then there’s the part with costumes.  She still doesn’t get why they do that either.  And she always picks costumes of characters she likes, from her favorite books, and then no one ever knows who she’s supposed to be, even though she always does a good job making the costumes.  She gets tired of explaining.

This year, she’s dressing up as Miss Marple, because she’s been reading a lot of Agatha Christie books lately.  She used to like Nancy Drew, but now she likes Agatha Christie much better, because the mysteries are better puzzles.  The titles are more honest, too—a lot of Nancy Drew books have _ghost_ or _phantom_ in the title and then just turn out to be about a person pretending, which doesn’t seem right.  She told Fox that and he laughed and said he saw where she was coming from.

She puts on an old dress—it was Mom’s, so she has to pin up the skirt to fit her—and puts white powder in her hair and carries knitting.  It’s hard to carry the knitting and the bag for her candy at once, but she needs it so her costume will be authentic.  Mom and Fox tell her that she looks fantastic, and Mom takes pictures, and then they drive over to Dana’s.

“Are you excited for trick-or-treating, Samantha?” Mom asks her in the car.

“I don’t know,” she says.  “I think maybe I’m too old.”  She’s been thinking about that for a while, since Kate, in her class, said that she wasn’t trick-or-treating this year because she was too old.

“Not if you don’t want to be,” Mom says.

She does want to be, sort of.  But she doesn’t think she is, because she’s never understood Halloween, even when she was younger.  Besides, everyone else likes it, so she thinks she’s supposed to like it too.  “Okay,” she says.

Dana opens the door when they get there, and Emily’s next to her, bouncing from foot to foot.  She’s always really excited on Halloween.  Her costume is Alice in Wonderland, Samantha can tell.  “Hi!” she says.

“Hi,” Samantha says.  “I like your costume.”

“Thank you,” Emily says. 

“Yours came out great, Samantha,” Dana says.  Fox has his arm around her; they do that a lot, now.  “Nice work on the hair.”

“Thank you,” Samantha says.  She already told Dana who she was going to be, so she doesn’t have to ask her what her costume is.

But lots of other people do, when they’re walking down the halls in Dana’s building, knocking on doors and getting candy.  “I’m Miss Marple,” she explains, and sometimes people give her strange looks.  Maybe they don’t know who Miss Marple is.

“You and your sister look so cute!” one woman says, and that makes no sense at all, because Miss Marple is not supposed to be cute.  And they’re not sisters.

“Emily and I are friends,” she tells the woman.  “Well, I’m going to be her aunt.  In a few months.”  Emily nods enthusiastically, and the woman looks a little confused, which is probably because most people’s aunts are much older than them, and she’s only about six years older than Emily.  But it’s true: she will be Emily’s aunt, now that Fox and Dana are going to get married.  She’s excited about it, because then they’ll all live in the same house and she’ll get to see Dana and Emily all the time.  Also, she thinks suddenly, maybe that means they won’t have anywhere to go trick-or-treating and they’ll get to just stop.

She doesn’t get to explain the whole thing to the woman, though, since they go on to the next apartment.  When they’re rounding the corner of the hall, Dana’s phone rings.  “Scully,” she says, answering it.  “They saw what?... It’s urgent?... He’s here.  Just a second.”  She covers the mouthpiece.  “Mulder,” she says, “a case just came in.  It’s a…”  She looks down at Emily.  “Well, you talk to Skinner,” she says, handing him the phone. 

“Mulder,” he says.  “No, that does not sound good…. Where did it happen?... Yeah, I think we can be over there in twenty minutes.”  He glances at Dana, who nods.  “We’ll be there,” he says, and then he hands the phone back to Dana, who puts it back in her pocket.  “We hate to do this,” he says, “but something just came up at work.  We’ll try to be back as soon as we can.”

“Teena, do you mind staying at my apartment with the girls?” Dana asks Mom.  “You and Samantha are welcome to spend the night, if it’s late.”  Mom nods. 

It’s a Tuesday.  “My things for school are all at home,” Samantha says.  “And my regular clothes.”

“We know, Sam,” Mulder says.  “Like I said, we’ll try not to be back too late.  But if we need to, we can go get your things in the morning.”

“Okay,” she says, nodding.  He bends down and gives her a hug, and Dana hugs Emily, and then they’re walking down the hall.  Samantha can hear them talking to each other, the way they talk when they’re on an important case.  Very serious.

“Will they come back soon?” Emily asks.  She’s looking down the hall after them too.

“Pretty soon, I hope,” Mom says.  “Do you girls want to go to a few more apartments?”  Samantha doesn’t, really, but Emily nods and so she follows her and Mom.

They go back to Dana’s apartment eventually, though, and put all their candy out on the table.  Mom looks at it to see if it’s wrapped, and Samantha helps her.  She can sort through it very quickly.  “Do you want my Snickers?” she asks Emily.  That’s another thing about Halloween.  You get candy you don’t even like.  Emily says she wants them, though, and she gives Samantha all her Smarties.  So that’s something.

Mom lets them stay up for a while—later than she usually lets Samantha stay up, on a school night—but then Emily starts yawning and she makes them go to bed.  Samantha doesn’t have any pajamas, so she just keeps her Miss Marple dress on, and she curls up in a sleeping bag on the floor of Emily’s room.  Tomorrow it won’t be Halloween any more.

When she wakes up, she can hear voices—it sounds like Fox and Dana are back, and maybe like they’re watching TV.  She goes into the living room to see.

Mom’s asleep in a chair, and Fox and Dana are on the couch; he’s got his arms around her, again.  “I can’t believe you’ve never seen this one,” he’s saying.  “It’s got to be the best ghost movie.”

“I’ve missed out, I guess,” she says.  “What’s happened, so far?”

“Well, they all got invited to the house,” he begins, and then he turns his head and sees Samantha.  “Hey, Sam,” he says.

“Hi,” she says.  “Did you figure out the case?”

“We’re working on it,” he says.

“We did as much as we could, tonight,” Dana says.  “We didn’t wake you up, did we?”

“No,” Samantha says.  “I just woke up anyway.”  They both nod at that; they know she does that a lot, that she doesn’t need to sleep very much.  “What are you watching?”

“It’s called _The Haunting_ ,” Fox says.  “It’s part of a Halloween movie marathon.”

“Can I watch with you?” she asks.

He looks at her for a minute, thinking.  “It’s pretty scary,” he says, “but I think you can handle it.  Let us know if you want to bail, though.”

“Okay,” she says.  She comes and sits on the couch next to them, still in her Miss Marple dress, still with her white hair.

She’s missed the beginning of the movie, but she catches up quickly; it’s about a bunch of people who go to a house full of ghosts.  Real ghosts, not like in Nancy Drew books.  You don’t see the ghosts, but you know they’re there, because the doors keep rattling, and they make people do things they don’t want to do.  And it is scary.  So scary. 

She loves it.

She doesn’t know what a Halloween movie marathon is, exactly, and she doesn’t know what it has to do with all the other parts of Halloween, with wearing costumes and with getting candy you don’t even like from people you don’t even know.   But that doesn’t matter, because she knows one thing.  She knows it’s the best part of Halloween.  Maybe there isn’t a reason for it, but that doesn’t matter, not when she can’t take her eyes away from the screen, not when it makes her shiver.

“How are you doing, Samantha?” Dana asks her, after a scene where the two women are trying to sleep and the ghosts keep banging at the door.  “Okay?”

“Good,” she says.  “Really good.”  And they keep watching until the end of the movie, and then another one starts, and it’s also about a house with ghosts in it, and she stays on the couch to watch that one too.


End file.
